- Dr. Carole Faucher*
I feel much honored to have been associated with prominent activists and scholars of the Newar community at the occasion of a consultative meeting held in Kathmandu on 20 March 2010 organized to discuss encoding Nepal scripts. My knowledge of Nepal and of the situation of the Newar is relatively basic at this point. However I would like to address the issue of encoding Nepal Lipi scripts from the perspective of an anthropologist specializing on Identity politics and power relations. In my research, which up to now has been based mostly in Southeast Asia, I tend to pay a specific attention to the role of language in shaping power relations. This is not a coincidence. I come from a country, Canada, which has been divided over language politics over much of its short history. The Quebec French-speaking community, to which I belong, has gone through decades of uncertainty and of struggle – mostly peacefully, before the French language finally gained the official recognition and status it possesses today at both provincial and national levels.
In Anthropology, we look at identity in terms of process. Collective identities, such as ethnicity and nationality, are continually being re-constructed through everyday life interactions. Ethnic identity is both situational and interactional and therefore should never be taken for granted. In all cases we are talking about an on-going process in which a large number of factors are involved. Ethnic identity is shaped through culture, and the enactment and reproduction of specific markers, such as religion, language, traditions, morality framework, shared historical memories and so on. We know who we are because there is some sort of consensus on these cultural markers among the members of our community. We live with these markers, we reproduce them through interaction, we transform them, adapt them, teach them through formal or informal means. Language is no doubt one of the most common - although often underestimated, markers for a large number of ethnic groups. It is through culture (in its anthropological sense) that we make sense of the world around us and locate ourselves in this world; it is through language that we interact with others and reproduce, teach, manage our culture. Spoken language is of course important, but nowadays, in this age of electronic media, written forms provide the users with a sense of belonging and of continuity, from classical texts to contemporary literature and even popular culture. All over the world today we regularly witness members of the younger generation describing the culture they were born into as out-of-fashion because it is not adequately represented in popular culture and electronic media. As I mentioned before, I see ethnicity and feeling of belonging as being constantly negotiated through everyday life interactions - this includes the interactions taking place in the cyberspace.
We can observe many cases of ethnic and national groups who have been socially and politically disempowered due to the lack of, or the systematic abolition through official means of the script historically associated with their spoken language. This is the case, for example of many Central Asian ethnic groups who have been imposed Cyrillic alphabet during Soviet period, or of former European colonies who are now using the Latin alphabet, of Lao, Thailand and Burmese minorities, North American indigenous groups and so on.
In my view, a script which has developed over centuries should ideally be re-united with the daily speech in order for the language to be recognized once again as fully operative. The Newar people of Nepal have the great advantage of having kept alive beautiful scripts as part of a rich set of cultural attributes. The project of encoding these scripts is in my view extremely important for the survival of the Newar culture: it will provide a strong tool to make the learning of the language more systematic, thus potentially helping to increase the number of users in everyday life communication. Lastly, the encoding will act as a great incentive for the youth to look at their Newar culture as dynamic and vibrant, encouraging them to continue to actively engage with it in their daily interaction in order to ensure its survival.
___________________________________
* Professor in International Public Policy, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Japan joined the Consultative meeting of Nepal scripts encoding as a Guest of Honour at the invitation of Nepal Study Center, Japan and Nepal Lipi Guthi, Kathmandu.
